System and method for performing symbol boundary aligned searches of signals. A preferred embodiment comprises a search control unit (such as search control unit 725) that can determine a start and stop condition for a correlation based on a hypothesis, a searcher (such as searcher 705) which includes a multiplexer that can select a subset of samples of a received sequence based on the hypothesis and start and stop conditions. The search control unit can then wait for the occurrence of the start condition and assign the hypothesis to a correlator, which will correlate the subset of samples with a locally generated pseudo-random number sequence based upon the hypothesis.